I am not a quiet
man. Even back when I graduated from high school, I was voted BMOC: Big Mouth
on Campus. Most people who have spent time around me end up hearing a lot about
my opinions on subjects ranging from The Phantom Menace to the Iraqi
War. Unlike readers of this blog, who choose to come here, they get subjected
to that simply by being around me.

I hope that Im
not a crashing bore or a strident loon when I start holding forth. My voice
and my tendency to use it are pretty hard-won things for me, however, and I
tend to react poorly when someone tries to take them away from me, whether out
of malice or in a well-meaning quest for social justice.

The hardest issues
in life are the ones where two or more incompatible positions have some undeniable
validity to them.

It is also true
that starting from these truths in search of redress and transformation sometimes
ends up simply redistributing these injuries. It is also true that acknowledging
the truth of these claims opens the door not just to women whose voices have
been unfairly and painfully marginalized but to reverse forms of pre-emptive
domination and a speech privilege that can be generously abused by female mediocrities
and drones whose previous exclusion from conversation has been a function of
the fact that they either have little worth saying or want the privilege of
making argumentative claims without the responsibility for giving them evidentiary
weight.

How can I distinguish
between someone calling for an equal place at the table and someone who is simply
being an anti-intellectual manipulator, a covert agent of 19th Century romanticism
advancing the cause of feeling over thinking, connection over individualism,
dialogue over debate? Or worse yet, manipulating that latent vein of the romantic
temperment simply in order to gain exclusive control over the terms of conventionally
argumentative institutional and intellectual contestation? Gerald Graff in his
recent work Clueless in Academe does a good job of pointing out how Deborah
Tannens oft-cited attack on the argument culture as a male-dominated
enterprise ultimately functions as a supremely skilled example of that which
it claims to despise, how Tannen not only participates in the argument
culture but in some ways trumps it by melding her evidentiary claims to
a rhetorical strategy that places any objection in a patriarchal prison before
that objection even begins.

This is also how
claims about women being silenced sometimes start: they put any male reader
or listener in an impossible position. If in the particular case being cited
by the critic, a male reader or listener judges that in fact silencing hasnt
really happened, or the critic has questionable or malicious motives for making
the claim, or the critic is misusing a public conversation as a place to make
claims without being willing to defend them, or even that the critic is well-meaning
and has a fair point that has limited scope, then the male listener is pretty
well screwed in advance. To object, even politely, in any particular case, if
the valid general point about masculine privilege and female silencing has already
been made, is to cast the male speaker as Exhibit A for the prosecution, a captive
specimen of patriarchial insensitivity. If you tell me that you feel silenced
by my speech, and hurt by your silencing, then I have to decide whether to do
something that you say hurts you. Put in those terms, it is an impossible situation,
and one that imposes silence by holding men hostage to empathy. It becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy: the men who continue to speak after a preemptive call
to silence are often the ones who cause the problem in the first place.

You might well
say, Well, if we invert the problem of silence back onto men, then theyll
know how it feels, and be moved to real transformation. It reminds me
of something that happened to me when I gave a faculty lecture here after my
daughter was born and showed a picture of her at the start of my PowerPoint
presentation, as a kind of explanation of why my project was in such a preliminary
and crudely conceptualized state after a years leave. A female colleague
confronted me afterwards and said, Thats totally unfair. You realize
no woman could get away with that: its cute when a man does it, but banal
when a woman does. People expect her to raise her kid, and its not an
alibi for her failure to complete work. Quite right. Absolutely. Thats
true, and it is unfair that I can do it and a female colleague cant. But
I would rather strive for a world where we all get to show pictures of our kids
and talk about the burdens on our labor time rather than a world where none
of us do. I would rather distribute privilege to everyone than deny it to all.
Id rather be called to expose and fight a dismissive reaction to a female
colleagues courage than be called to stop doing something myself. I'd
rather be honest than have to self-censor.

The problem is
that unless you reject outright the idea that some speech is qualitatively better,
more useful, more helpful, more germane, more entertaining than other speech
in various particular contexts, you also have to leave room for a given individual
womans speech or a given individual mans speech being better or
worse, more worth hearing or less worth hearing, more useful or less useful,
than someone elses speech.

What makes this
especially difficult for me personally is that I have a very hard time separating
out anti-intellectualism, which I view as largely illegitimate and very personally
hurtful, and absolutely valid criticisms of male assertions of privilege in
conversation, including my own assertions of and abuses of privilege. In my
experience, the latter is sometimes used as a Trojan Horse for the former.

For me, my voice
really is hard-won, despite the fact that I was also born to it as a man, and
I suspect this is true for many other male academics. Being a geek and intellectual
from age 5 to 18 is no easy road for men or women, but in some ways, men probably
get it worse in that male violence and intimidationand the over-valuation
of male physical prowessare much more open., apparent and pervasive. In
4th grade (and most grades after that) answering a question in class usually
meant I got the shit kicked out of me during recess. I kept answering questions
anyway. Thats a hard legacy to surrender lightly, especially when you
suspect, sometimes with some validity, that the people calling you to silence
now are doing so with some of the same motives or interests as the people who
used to kick the shit out of you in 4th grade.

So what do we do
to acknowledge or deal with the validity of the complaint against some men in
specific and against masculine privilege in general? Two very different things,
depending on the nature of the complaint: we have to learn to distinguish between
questions of power and questions of etiquette.

We have been very
badly served by those forms of feminism, Foucauldianism and other kinds of critical
theory that undifferentiatedly locate power everywhere, or reduce all kinds
of interaction and social relation to nothing more than power differentials.
When we react to every single form of daily practice as if it is as vitally
connected to power in the world as every other practice, we lose any ability
to set an agenda and react proportionately to the problems we face. To me, this
is one of the subterranean ways in which certain flavors of Foucauldian rhetoric
end up being reactionary: by placing power everywhere, and refusing to speak
of some kinds of power as peculiarly or particularly illiberal, they encourage
a kind of simultaneous rhetoric of radical anger fused with a futilitarian inability
to actually do anything except complain about relative trivialities, because
it is the trivialities which are accessible to critique.

We need to recognize
that sometimes, male speech in cross-gendered settings is no more than bad manners.
Manners are rules. Rules exist so to promote a kind of equal opportunity access
to a game, an equal chance to achieve objectives. The consequences of rule-breaking
in some cases are minor, and even when they are more significant, they still
have limited importance. They are annoying, the kind of thing one can kvetch
about but not attack as an urgent social problem requiring urgent solution.
Would all conversations be better with mutual respect and a consideration for
all participants? Of course they would be. The better in this case
is largely aesthetic and transactional: a conversation of this better kind would
be more pleasing, more interesting, more revelatory. All participants would
learn more from it. This is worth striving for, but one is not entitled to do
more than get annoyed and frustrated about a conversation where certain forms
of male speech have prevented the most interesting possible experience from
emerging.

To follow this
a bit further, when it comes to the aesthetic side of things, there is no necessary
reason to favor either a feminine or masculine flavor
to conversation. This is one of the areas where Tannens work is most seriously
abused, when the comparison between a conversation that promotes expressions
of feeling, personal revelation, empathy, and sharing and a conversation that
privileges conflict, debate, argument and opposition is conflated with the difference
between social justice and repression. If these two kinds of conversations really
are female and male identifieda representation
which Im wary of from the outset, given how much it touches on stereotypethen
they amount to nothing more than a tomayto, tomahto kind of difference,
a preference and nothing more. I like both kinds of conversation: it depends
on my mood, on the nature of the issue on the table, and on the other participants.
(Moreover, some women I know speak male and quite a few men I know
speak female.)

Where urgency is
justified is when male modes of participation in conversation are connected
to male forms of institutional and social power. But if those connections are
ready too generally and generically, they amount to nothing. Its like
Andrea Dworkin defining everything as oppressive heteronormativity, including
any and all expressions of love between men and women. Thats a critique
that ultimately amounts either to nothing or to a nearly-nihilistic kind of
revolutionary demand that views 99% of everyday life as we know it as contaminated.

Anybody who wants
to walk in between has to do the hard work of making specific claims about specific
kinds of illberality residing in specific practices within specific institutions.
For example, what kind of power flows from asynchronous conversation in a voluntary-membership
virtual community, for example, particularly one with no moderation governing
what can or cannot be posted and where no one can physically interrupt the simultaneous
speech of others? I submit: virtually nil. In that kind of space, there are
no meaningful claims to be made about illiberal power, only claims about rudeness
and aestheticswhich are not trivial concerns, but they come with a different
kind of rhetoric and a limited right to make urgent demands on others. On the
other hand, what kind of power comes from a department meeting that decides
on the tenure of a female academic? Quite a lot, and here claims about male
speech and male participation in discourse might justify an urgent rhetoric
of demand and reform if they can be made in tangible, specific form.

So whats
the solution? If were just talking about the problem of manners, then
we can promote a positive etiquette of conversation, a set of understood rules,
that calls attention to male misbehavior. That requires men to be part of the
discussion, however, and it also requires an understanding that manners are
no more than normative suggestions. The more formalistic we get about the rules
of conversation, the less productive conversations are. There is a happy medium
in committee meetings, academic workshops, classroom discussions and bull sessions
that weve probably all experienced at least once or twice where conversation
flows smoothly between all participants, male and female, where there is a sense
of productivity and accomplishment and movement, where egos sit in the back
of the rhetorical bus, and where there is no obligation or requirement that
everyone speak. When that kind of golden conversation happens, it does not happen
because there are highly formal rules that require everyone to be recognized
in turn and given their two minutes to speak. Most of the time, highly formalized
speech is unproductive speech, a paper egalitarianism that robs all participants
of their creative energies and their expressive freedom.

When formalisms
matter is when the question of power is legitimately front and center. In tenure
meetings or interviews with job candidates, in faculty senates, in processes
that have a major structural role in deliberative choices for institutions,
then formalism might be a way to address the problem of gender and speech, and
only then. Thats when one might appropriately say to men, Shut the
fuck up (until its your turn). Saying shut the fuck up
on any other occasion misunderstands the nature of the problem, applies an inappropriate
remedy, and actively hamstrings the dialogic process that might change the everyday
practice of conversation for the better.